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I put a professional directory project online since few weeks, Google has started to index some pages but i just noticed a flaw in the design of the pages.

Each page have an adress, some content and a dynamic phone number and because the dynamic phone number (the number change every hour) is on the top of the page, Google display an incorrect phone number in the summary of the page in it's results.

So my question is: it is posible to forbid google to display this information or should i have to put some extra content before the number to overide it?

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    Why do you have a dynamic phone number changing every hour that is incorrect? Aug 16, 2012 at 16:24

2 Answers 2

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You cannot forbid Google from crawling a certain portion of an html page. If you output it into the document then it is crawlable if Google is allowed to view it.

You could use javascript to load in your phone number bit after the page has loaded but this will not stop Google's Instant Previews from displaying it.

Another idea is you could put a call-to-action type of button that when clicked loads in via javascript the address/phone number combo as needed.

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  • Thanks, i folowed your advice and choosed the javascript method :) Aug 23, 2012 at 8:57
  • Google might see this as a violation of their guild lines; as you show 1 thing to the users and another to GoogleBot. Be careful.
    – YardenST
    Aug 25, 2012 at 8:35
  • @YardenST I will have to disagree with you 100%. There is no difference in content to the googlebot. Its the same for everyone. Aug 25, 2012 at 15:42
  • @Anthony Bottom line, you tell him to do something to "trick" Googlebot. I believe its not the right attitude but this is my opinion. I would go with your other recommendation (call-to-action)
    – YardenST
    Aug 25, 2012 at 18:09
  • @YardenST It has nothing to do with tricking googlebot. It has to do with keeping the page the same for every page load or loading stuff to provide a speed improvement. The phone number changes on the fly so it should be requested by the user on a click. Same as ads are done with javascript so bots do not follow them, etc. This is not cloaking or tricking. Aug 27, 2012 at 1:29
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You can do 2 main things:

  1. Tell Google using sitemaps changefreq that the page is changing every day, and Google may or may not crawl it every day (this depends on many factors, but the GoogleBot should do it eventually).

  2. Create your own snippet. using the META DESCRIPTION tag. If it descriptive enough and relevant to the user's query Google will show it to the user rather than a auto-geneated snippet (most of the times).

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